Focusing on my life and adventures living south of the river near Deptford

Friday, 20 June 2014

Australia at the Royal Academy

It might be rather late given the exhibition finished in December but
here goes nonetheless. My blog has been hijacked by a rather simple art
lover...

Right from the first moment of entering Australia at the RA it is
apparent that this exhibition was going to be a nostalgic trip. Shaun
Gladwell’s, Approach to Mundi Mundi
reflecting the vastness of the country and the distances people will travel to
get around. The first thing I learnt in coming to the UK over 17 years ago is
that Australia is not the centre of the universe; although many of my friends
back home still struggle to believe me when I try to explain this.

One of the biggest regrets I have is never being brave enough to take
the step to study Aboriginal Art as it meant committing to Anthropology and
moving away from Art History; a discipline that I felt at home with. Sadly the
Australia I grew up in dismissed Aborigines and their cultural heritage with
suspicion, more because we did not make an effort to understand it, however I
digress.

The first topographical images of Australian cities highlighted the
British tradition that was first brought to the colony. Produced quite early,
in the European part of the nation’s history just over 10 years after the first
settlement they depict the development of the country, showing just how
isolated these little snippets of old England were.

The fascination with Romanticism; and the overwhelming sublime quality
of the harsh landscape comes to the fore in the works of Von Guerard especially
Mount Kosciusko and Bushfire.
These paintings could hold their own in the extraordinary catalogues of both
Friedrich and Church respectively. This was a country that was harsh yet
beautiful. The representation of the first contact with the indigenous people
is something that was not always properly discussed in the tradition of Australian
Art History. For all of the beautiful landscapes of John Glover which include
native inhabitants, by this time Tasmania was devoid of the land’s custodians.[1] Yet in
the same room there are some more naive works of art which show the Aborigines
in a more sympathetic light. William Barak’s depiction of an Aboriginal tribe
is quite touching in its crudeness. This is all the more interesting by his
writing to Queen Victoria to enquire about the better treatment of his people,
as he himself was a Native Police tracker.

Artists such as Roberts and Streeton are firm Australian favourites and
are well represented. Monumental images such as Fire’s On! by Streeton show the unforgiving qualities of the
Australian landscape so much show that the rugged painterly brush strokes which
represent the rocks are repeated in the blue sky to create a warm yet
unbreakable wall of monumentality. Despite the attempts to break down the wall
with explosives their efforts are futile as can be seen by the casualty being
stretchered out of the mine’s entrance. The mythology of Australia being a land
of rugged outback heroes has been eulogised for many a year and Tom Roberts
with paintings such as A Break Away!
showing a drover hurtling through a desert landscape to catch a stray sheep is
one such key image. Frederic McCubbin’s Lost
represented the realities faced by the pioneering families, that the desolation
and loneliness of the landscape was a frightening prospect. The futility and
sadness that often attempted to suppress the strength of the white settlers was
never more beautifully produced in such a sentimental way than in The Pioneer, an ode to the family. For
all of these images of the outback there is also a small collection of
burgeoning images of the city with the cigar box lids of the “9 x 5” exhibition
including street scenes and even one of an Australian Rules football match
representing the changing interest in the emerging urban landscapes of the
country. Roberts showing his interest in not only the outback but also the
bustle of the city in his small painting, Allegro
con brio, Bourke Street. This attempt to create an Impressionism in
Australia comes to the fore with Charles Conders water scenes, including the
iconic Holiday at Mentone, which would not be out of place with Monet’s early
beach scenes.

Placed at the behind McCubbin’s
monumental triptych was Grace Cossington-Smith’s immense polyptych, creating an interesting
dialogue between the traditional representations of the Australian outback and
the early modern focus on everyday life in the cities. The iconic Sydney
Harbour Bridge showing how Australia does also have a heritage of producing
industrial landscapes not just ones inspired by nature. This is an area where
the exhibition excelled showing works by other early leading women artists
including Clarice Beckett’s Tonalist urban landscapes with trams and also the
exquisite The Expulsion by Margaret
Preston, replacing Adam and Eve with aborigines, native flowers (Sturt Desert
Pea) and animals (a kangaroo and koala).[2] It was
touching that these were next to the exquisite landscapes of Albert Namatjira,
incidentally one of the few aboriginal artists we looked at in Art History
classes as he worked in a recognisable style.

The interest in the Australian family was brought to the fore again
through John Brack’s The Car
featuring family with two children undertaking a journey within the cramped
confines of their vehicle. The isolation of a man and an abandoned pram, in
Jeffrey Smart’s beach scene is ambiguous in that the viewer is unable to work
out whether the man is the owner of the pram and whether there is a child
within. This ever modernising landscape and the people in it further
highlighted by the increasing interest in the beach which I guess came with the
urbanisation of the cities and the interests of the workers especially in the
cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Max Dupain’s photograph, Sunbaker, exposing a more modern view of Australian’s as bronzed
and sporty.

The early modern painters of the cities are perhaps where my interest
waned especially as I have very little knowledge or understanding of what comes
after. Nevertheless the paintings of Second World War Australia are where it
started to show gaps in the survey. Whilst paintings like Albert Tucker’s
Bathers more than ably represented the Angry Penguins group and the interest in
Surrealism it this section began to be more noticeable for its omissions. Painters
like John Olsen, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Joy Hester, Vic O’Connor and
William Dobell were noticeable absentees (and I could mention others). John
Blackman’s paintings of the aboriginal bride would have been an excellent way
to show that Australia’s attitude to its indigenous population did not advance
much from the early settlers to the 1950’s.

Nevertheless the Nolan paintings showed the mythology of Australia’s
past, a heroic way and iconic way of representing of the historical infancy of
the country (granted white). Ned Kelly being an Australian figure, equal to
Britain’s Robin Hood in that he was worshipped by those less fortunate. Arthur
Boyd actually creating a biblical, apocalyptic vision of Australia,
“Brueghelian”[3]
if I may use the word I learnt from the RA’s label drawing on Pieter the
Elder’s Tower of Babel for his horrible, haunting mess of the town’s
inhabitants in The Mining Town (casting Aside the Money Lenders from the
Temple). I am not sure why the RA added an “h” to this term; it does remain a
mystery. One of perhaps the best known artists in Australian homes, Russell
Drysdale’s landscapes depict the beauty and desolation of the outback.

It seems as though the exhibition was brought together with Australian
galleries to display the ever changing landscape of the country. Yet there is a
focus on the people within these landscapes and the lack of portraiture does
tend to let the show down. It would have been fantastic if the exhibition could
have been broken down into eras rather than one large survey. However we really
should be thankful that the RA has been able to highlight the art of Australia
and put on, what for me was a fantastic nostalgia trip reminding me that the
art of my country does matter.

About Me

Bowley Bear is the non de plume of Chris Morton who aspires to be an art historian. Currently researching the history of the Blackheath School of Art pre 1940. Passionate about early Netherlandish art, stained glass and misericords. Hopefully one day my research and interests will come to something more than being 'just a hobby'. Previous areas of research include the early works of Clifton Pugh, the dissemination of copies of the Notre Dame de Grace de Cambrai and the Patronage of Nicholas Ruterius and the Leuven Charterhouse stained glass.